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Comment by dandellion | Hacker News Reader

As a foreign English speaker, it's a huge pet peeve is when people use acronyms without having used the full sentence before. Especially when the acronym is already a word or expression and looking it up just returns a bunch of useless examples (oh!). Eventually I'll find out the meaning (other half), and it always turns out they only saved a total of six or seven letters, which can be typed in less than 0.5 seconds, but in exchange they made their sentence more or less incomprehensible for a large group of people.

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As a native English speaker, I had no idea what OH was either. I’ve seen SO for significant other and not stack overflow, and I’ve seen reference to better half not just other half. By that choice, I am left to assume this person feels they are the better half which says a lot about them.

> By that choice, I am left to assume this person feels they are the better half which says a lot about them.

What a ridiculous assumption.

Maybe they consider themselves and their partner to be equal halves of a whole. You know, the definition of half.

As a native speaker, you probably scratched your head and worked out what could fit in that gap and eventually worked it out. Then you'll grumble because the other speaker didn't choose your preferred diction.

As a non native speaker you'll probably just feel upset/hopeless/angry.

From my experience, "non-native" here includes people who are "fluent".

So we arrive at the situation where my OH-SO beloved wife is fluent in English and is definitely better than me at writing clearly constructed English essays but when it comes to usage of random idioms/slang or understanding local (and foreign!) English accents I have a very clear advantage.

actually, no, other half never popped into my head. i only got it from seeing other comments in the thread of people confused by it as well.

Paste the comment into an LLM and ask it what it means. Don’t use Google.

OTOH we are one of today's "lucky" 10,000? And future searches will possibly lead to this post, further reducing friction to using this acronym. Also newly trained LLMs will also be able to answer quicker. Yay?

I wonder how acronyms such as OTOH even become so well known that they can be used without fear or not being understood? When is that threshold reached? Is using OH now the beginning of a new well-known acronym? I guess only time will tell...

the far more common and acceptable-to-use-without-introduction acronym for this is SO (significant other)

And to answer the question - the threshold is when people stop complaining about the use :)

I've literally never seen "OTOH" in my life. Anyhow, if you really feel your sentence can't do without it you can say "conversely" which is pretty short and clear.

OTOH dates back to the 90s and has since remained very common in internet writing. It is more surprising that you've never seen it than that someone used it.

It also isn't an exact synonym of "conversely".

There aren't any exact synonyms in English.

I've been an extensive internet user for decades and I don't have it in memory, so I'm not sure how to feel about your assertion. I'm not the only person saying this.

> There aren't any exact synonyms in English.

I'm sure that depends on the tolerance. "assist" and "help"? "dog" and "canine"? "purchase" and "buy"?

I'm not just being pedantic, it's a fairly mainstream assertion in linguistics. I don't find those words synonymous. They have different performative content. I don't know if this applies to other languages.

We are not in a text chat using T9 on a numeric keypad where typing is painful. There’s no need for acronyms now except for the attempt at not looking like an old or just lazy. We’re also not limited to 140 chars, so not an advantage there either.

The lucky 10,000 applies to things that 100% of people have heard by the time they're 30. This on the other hand, is something that judging by the comments very, very few people actually use and know, which means I'm instead one of the unlucky few that today learned something pretty much completely useless.

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